Just came across
this article from AOL. The text is taken directly from the AP, but the difference is that AOL added some neat space pictures.
Basically, they've been looking around at different things with the Hubble Telescope. A few years back, one crazy guy randomly decided to use his extremely rare and valuable time (one telescope for everyone to share...) to look at a blank spot where there were no visible stars. Brilliant. Waste your chance staring off into the blackness of space.
Here's (a sample of) what he saw:
[img]
http://www.aolcdn.com/aolnews_photos/0d/03/20070825195009990001[/img]
By looking between the visible stars of our galaxy, he managed to see out into the wider universe... Where there are as many galaxies full of billions of stars as there are stars that you can see in our night sky. (Each of those specks of light is an entire galaxy, and the whole picture is of a tiny patch of what otherwise looks like blackness even to our best ground-based telescopes.)
Since then, other people have used their time to investigate other patches of blackness... and they've generally seen more of the same: vistas full of an unimaginable number of galaxies, floating out in the space far beyond the edges of our own little galaxy.
But now they've stumbled on to something else... A huge patch of utter blackness. A gigantic void, far bigger than anything ever expected.
No telling what it means just yet. The article mentions that holes are usually the result of gravitational forces from larger bodies pulling the smaller objects away, leaving emptiness behind. But that's an unthinkably huge area to have been so cleared.
I suppose if it was something as simple as a black hole blocking our view, they'd have figured that out.
I wonder if they've actually managed to get a glimpse of the edge of the universe - the great cosmic void beyond the range where matter has managed to drift. If such a thing exists in the first place.
Or I suppose it could be the opposite - a look inward to an area so old that all the stars have died out.
Or maybe it's the patch where a certain
giant guy in purple space armor has recently been snacking.
In any case... intriguing. And another small piece in the great puzzle of the universe.
